Meredith, George 1828-1909
English novelist

Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, he was educated privately in Germany. In London, after being articled to a solicitor, he turned to journalism and letters, his first venture appearing in Chambers's Journal in 1849, the year in which he married Mary Ellen Nicolls, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock. This disastrous marriage gave him an insight into relations between the sexes, which appear as largely in his work as his other great interest, natural selection as Nature's way of perfecting man. His writing did not bring him much financial reward and he had to rely on his articles in The Fortnightly and his work as a reader in the publishing house of Chapman and Hall. His prose works started with a burlesque Oriental fantasy, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), followed in 1859 by The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, but he did not achieve general popularity as a novelist until Diana of the Crossways appeared in 1885. Other popular titles include Evan Harrington (1860), Harry Richmond (1871), and best of all, Beauchamp's Career (1875), which poses the question of class and party and is well constructed and clearly written. This cannot be said of his later major novels, The Egoist (1879), a study of refined selfishness, and The Amazing Marriage (1895). These two powerful works are marred by the artificiality and forced wit which occurs in so much of his poetry. His main poetic work is Modern Love (1862), a novelette in pseudo-sonnet sequence form, based partly on his first marriage. Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883) again discussed his master themes - the 'reading of earth' and the sex duel. A Reading of Life (1901) adds little to the record. The modern revaluation of the Victorians has enhanced the fame of this very cerebral poet.

Bibliography: L Stevenson, The Ordeal of Meredith (1954)